The Director of the Institute is Professor Pankaj Sharma. In addition to being its director he is also a consultant neurologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

Professor Sharma holds a University of London Chair of Neurology at Royal Holloway. He is a former British Heart Foundation Clinician Scientist at Cambridge and a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard Medical School. He holds double doctorates from both the University of Cambridge and University of London. Most recently he led the internationally renowned Imperial College Cerebrovascular Research Unit at Imperial College London.

Professor Sharma’s research seeks to use genetics, genomics and proteomics to advance human understanding of cerebrovascular disease in three key areas: prediction, diagnosis and treatment of stroke at the molecular level.  He has a particular interest in the genetics of stroke in ethnic minorities, particularly South Asians and Middle Eastern populations.